In South Korea, tentions and conflicts have intensified as the major election draws near. One politician's ridiculous comment that his Twitter account was “exploded” by the opposition to stymie his campaign has come under fire.

As Twitter confirmed on March 29, 2012, that “account explosion” – which is the exact word the politician used – is technically impossible, the politician's remark and the governing conservative party's rhetoric have drawn numerous jokes and sneers online.

Twitter “explosion”?

The phrase “Twitter account explosion” is a strange term that even many South Koreans feel unfamiliar with. Its English equivalent and a proper universal term would be “account suspension”, but the language was adopted by the ruling Saenuri partyand its member Kim Jong-hoon to define Kim's Twitter malfunction.

When the account is doing regular activities, it will not be suspended by mass blocks from other Twitter users. The main cause of suspension is when a user does ‘aggressive following’ which results in getting blocks from many other users or when one tweets repetitive messages to other users who do not follow him.

If there is ever such a thing called ‘Twitter account explosion’, the accounts of celebrities with numerous anti-fans would always explode, which means just repetitively reporting someone's account as spam cannot suspend the account. Don't be fooled by someone pretending to be a victim but who in fact got suspended for violating our regulations.

If some accounts are aggressively or indiscriminately following hundreds of accounts just to garner attention […] when an account repeatedly follows and un-follows large numbers of users, this may be done to get lots of people to notice them, to circumvent a Twitter limit, or to change their follower-to-following ratio.[…] These behaviors negatively impact the Twitter experience for other users, are common spam tactics, and may lead to account suspension.

Lee added that the Saenuri party has adopted a new evaluation system on candidate's social networking abilities, which measures their networking by the number of Twitter followers.

For South Korean net users who have seen enough of these repetitive accusations, which blame anything unsolved and dubious on North Korea or pro-North Korean elements, it just provided another thing to ridicule and lampoon on Twitter and blogsphere.

The Saenuri party was enraged after claiming that Kim's Twitter account explosion was done by pro-North Korean leftists. But it is proven to be an account suspension caused by aggressive attempts to increase its number of followers. What a refreshing [career] suicide action! Will they ever give us time to get bored?

Kim Jong-hoon asserted that some pro-North Korean sides have ‘exploded’ his account. But according to Twitter main office, it was an account suspension due to violation of user guidelines. What actually happened is that after he aggressively followed people to increase his follower numbers, his account was treated as spam. It is an international embarrassment for those ignorant people who unsuccessfully tried to bring the ideology/political angles into play [this refers to the fact that the party jumped to the conclusion that it was done by pro-Communists].

There is a Korean site ‘TWT119‘, which claims to save older tweets prior to account suspension and provide a backup service. TWT119 submitted an open letter to Twitter office asking to investigate further this case. However, blogger Berry Lee revealed [ko] what this site does is to merely translate users’ complaints from Korean to English language. He added that users don't need this separate service since the official Twitter would have their own servers storing tweets.